David Walsh: The lost art of being a real fan

Share via

OVER the past few days I have been reading Tom Humphries’s fine book on sportswriting, Laptop Dancing And The Nanny Goat Mambo. Humphries begins with an assessment of where our profession lies at the beginning of the 21st century. His conclusion is that we are further away from the centre of sport than ever before.

“Sportswriters used to come out from the inside and describe to everyone else just what they’d seen. Now we are ring-fenced off. In our sourly sceptical way, we process what is fed to us on a spoon and then we move on . . . We carp and